Even as Microsoft Azure revenue grows, AWS’s market share lead stays strong

When analyzing the cloud market, there are many ways to look at the numbers; revenue, year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter growth - or lack of it - or market share. Each of these numbers tells a story, but in the cloud market, where aggregate growth remains high and Azure's healthy expansions continues, it's still struggling to gain meaningful ground on AWS's lead.

This has to be frustrating to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has managed to take his company from cloud wannabe to a strong second place in the IaaS/PaaS market, yet still finds his company miles behind the cloud leader. He's done everything right to get his company to this point, but sometimes the math just isn't in your favor.

Numbers don't lie

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, says Microsoft's growth rate is higher overall than Amazon's, but AWS still has a big lead in market share. "In absolute dollar terms, it usually has larger increments in revenue numbers and that makes Amazon hard to catch," he says, adding "what I can say is that this is a very tough gap to close and mathematically it could not happen any time soon, whatever the quarterly performance of Microsoft and AWS."

The thing to remember with the cloud market is that it's not even close to being a fixed pie. In fact, it's growing rapidly and there's still plenty of market share left to win. As of today, before Amazon has reported, it has a substantial lead, no matter how you choose to measure it.